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High PPI testing

Laptops, CRT, certain LCD desktop monitors and smartphones are capable of high PPI. This page tests this by displaying images at a smaller than their native size. That means if you open this page on a high PPI device next to a normal 96 PPI one, there will be a difference of sharpness and detail. You can try it out on “normal” monitors by using the page zoom in your browser. Zoom in to 200% and you should clearly see the diffierence in the images. The logo of my site is also higher resolution than displayed.

So since browsers maintain intended relationships as you zoom, they proportionally increase the displayed size of the image – re-sizing them as you zoom in and out.

It seems like a really easy way to make pages high-PPI friendly with existing standards – no vector graphics (beyond what’s already in HTML) needed. I’d say in the near-term for high-PPI displays that definitely outweighs the downsides – no perfectly sharp re-sizing like you would get with vector images, and a performance hit from downloading higher res images and then re-sizing them. Well, the extra bandwidth and processing will certainly make a difference, but I guess it depends on the particular case.

Regardless, I’ve viewed flash videos (beyond the obvious photos and such) at 3840×2400 on my T221 and they’re absolutely amazing. It’s only a matter of time before we’ll see widespread high-PPI monitors. Too long, but at least we’re moving in the right direction.

I agree. And if the PPI is as high as double 1920, people can still play games on a midrange graphics card by playing at exactly hafl the resolution. Hell it may not matter what resolution because the PPI is so high…

Yeah – the only problem with the T221 is that when you do use 1920×1200, it still does scaling of a sort – averaging out adjacent pixels. It doesn’t look very good for lines – it blurs them. So you’d want a way to disable that – in fact, I’m not sure why the T221 scales 1920×1200 in the first place.

So you can’t set 1:1 i the monitor menus? Maybe your graphic card is scaling it for you? It does that with the LCDs I tested. Yes it will never be as sharp as native resolution, but should be much better than scaling on a 96DPI LCD.